An ex-employee has accused Amazon of breaching UK sanctions by selling facial recognition technology to Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, The Financial Times reported. Charles Forrest alleged that he was unfairly dismissed in 2023 after accusing Amazon of wrongdoing on a number of issues between November 2022 and May 2023, according to the article. The allegations were presented to a London employment tribunal as part of a hearing this week. Forrest said that Amazon closed a deal with Russian firm VisionLabs to provide access to its Rekognition facial recognition technology. It did that "through what appears to be a shell company based in the Netherlands," according to the tribunal filings.

A report from the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveals the accuracy of various facial recognition algorithms. Higher numbers are better as they indicate a lower prevalence of false positives. The "N" values represent the number of individuals enrolled in each simulation of aircraft boarding. The N 42,000 simulation, for example, is designed to represent an airport security line where many people are expected. The "k" values give the number of images of each en- rollee in each gallery.

TBILISI, July 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - (Editor's note: contains offensive language and terms of racial abuse) From scanning residents' faces to let them into their building to spotting police suspects in a crowd, the rise of facial recognition is accompanied by a growing chorus of concern about unethical uses of the technology. A report published on Monday by U.S.-based researchers showing that Russian facial recognition companies have built tools to detect a person's race has raised fears among digital rights groups, who describe the technology as "purpose-made for discrimination." Developer guides and code examples unearthed by video surveillance research firm IPVM show software advertised by four of Russia's biggest facial analytics firms can use artificial intelligence (AI) to classify faces based on their perceived ethnicity or race. There is no indication yet that Russian police have targeted minorities using the software developed by the firms - AxxonSoft, Tevian, VisionLabs and NtechLab - whose products are sold to authorities and businesses in the country and abroad. But Moscow-based AxxonSoft said the Thomson Reuters Foundation's enquiry prompted it to disable its ethnicity analytics feature, saying in an emailed response it was not interested "in promoting any technologies that could be a basis for ethnic segregation".

There are some frequent stereotypes you'll hear about Russian men, mainly that they're all a bunch of alcoholic football soccer fans who die early because of their love for vodka, leaving behind some of the most beautiful women on the planet who outlive them by ten years on average. While the stereotypes have some serious merit, Russia isn't just about hard drinking, chasing skirts, and hooliganism. All that vodka fuels some of the world's brightest minds, like Russia's fearless leader, Vladimir Putin, who believes that artificial intelligence will be the key to global supremacy. As China and the US are fighting for AI supremacy and the EU is scrambling to catch up, Russia's growing its footprint in AI with a seemingly low-key approach. Hearing less about Russian AI companies doesn't mean they don't exist though.

A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them "see". VisionLabs, a solutions developer in the field of computer vision, data analysis and robotics, and a Skolkovo IT Cluster resident have developed this as a global open-source computer vision project with the support of Facebook and Google, an official said. VisionLabs integrated two popular libraries for developers - OpenCV and Torch. The joint project with Facebook and Google was launched last year. "The two IT giants became interested in the in-depth study of neural networks and artificial intelligence and hence extended their support," the official told IANS.